Last night I kicked off the Big baseball project 2011

I developed a deep love for the game of baseball when I went to see a Rockies game in Denver with my OpenStreetMap friends at the State Of The Map conference.

OK that's a lie. I sat looking confused like all the other European OpenStreetMappers there. In fact we were all quite hilariously confused, especially when the whole crowd spontaneously stood up and sang some kind of exercise routine song. But it was great fun, and I realised I was going to have to set up a Baseball edit tracker and user rankings

This is using the same code as the previous edit tracker of tennis edits during wimbledon, so was fairly quick to get set up. We also have (and this is really awesome) a tutorial video made especially for the big baseball project:

How to add a baseball diamond by Ian Dees.

and also...

A baseball data map from ITOworld.

Last night it was pretty funny chatting on IRC to iandees, ToeBee, Firefishy and rweait, whilst they battled for baseball mapping superiority in the rankings. That contest is still in full swing, but...

...really the number I'm most interested in, is shown in bright yellow here. At time of writing we have 58 different people editing baseball fields. The real game is to get that number up, by getting the message out about this game (and about OpenStreetMap in general) to folks in the U.S. We want to attract new people to join in, as a way of getting people making a simple first edit. That's why the tutorial video is so awesome.

If anyone has ideas for reaching out to people about this, now is the time. The project runs until the end of the World Series on October 27th! You score a home run if you can get the story in the U.S. press. There's a short press release here with the main message. OpenStreetMap is fun, easy, and it's a good cause!